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Some time ago the good folks behind my favorite media player Audacious decided to abandon in-built support for Last.FM submissions.

The reasoning behind this seems to be that the Last.FM API was becoming a little too much to maintain which I suppose is fair enough in its quest to remain just a music player i.e. not a screen-hogging iTunes clone like so many others.

Heres how to put Last.FM support back into Audacity.

I’m going to assume you are a sensible person and using a Debian based system rather than Fedora. If you are one of these hat loving deviants, substitute ‘yum’ for apt-get below and feel free to voyage though the countless pains required to get Yum to actually do its job.

Installing LastFMSubmitD

I’m not sure on the capitalization of the daemon process LastFMSubmitD so that might be the wrong name entirely.

OPTIONAL – Set up the HTTP_PROXY

For some reason the daemon does not get proxy details right. This is easily fixed by opening /etc/init.d/lastfmsubmitd in your favorite editor and inserting the following line somewhere near the top (I put it after the ‘GROUP=’ line which should be the last bit of the daemon config area).
If you have no idea what a proxy is or why you should be doing this you can probably skip this section.

After trying in vein to find decent documentation on the Merge functionality of Unison I eventually gave in and invested an hour or two trying out different Linux based merge programs in order to find something Unison, the merge program and I were happy with.

Doesn’t work too well with Unison. I can’t get gnome-terminal (my terminal of choice) to execute synchronously so I was forced to fall back on XTerm instead.

After using XTerm I immediately hit upon a problem: there is no sensible way of outputting the results of a merge in VimDiff. Which is a pity because I do prefer VIM as an editor but this lack of functionality is annoying (yes I could have used a wrapper script but I’m trying to keep this simple).

Not as good looking as Meld but provides pretty much everything I want in a merge program including the all important merged file output that Unison requires.

Can get a little annoying though with its insentient pop-up boxes. I wish there were a ‘Dont show this option again’ option to each. KDE is usually quite good with this so I’m not sure why KDiff3 managed to escape this unspoken standard.

If you are comfortable with KDiff3 you could remove the ‘confirmmerge’ line which forces Unison to double check you actually want to accept the changes.

The downside to the above interactive merging process is there is no sensible way to preview the merge in Unison (the ‘View Merge’ button in the confirmation dialogue). For now though its preferable to not having this functionality at all.

Since most Linux shells have a major problem with doing this in a sensible way, the following (on my box called simply ‘0’) takes any input (either from files or via a pipe) and converts the characters.

The downside to having a box for development though is the constant config of apache to host these sites, most of which require absolute links (e.g. ‘/css/style.css’) to function.

The Apache snippet below sets up dynamic sub-domains which can be changed without reloading Apache every time you add, remove or update anything something. Simply drop your sites inside /var/www whenever you want a new subdomain. Alternatively you can symlink if they are hosted elsewhere on the box.

Its pretty easy to install, simply paste the below in your /etc/apache2/apache.conf file…

Now any directory you place in the /var/www directory automatically becomes a subdomain. You can now visit http:///server.localhost as a fully fledged webhost.

If you want to use another name than the rather boring ‘localhost’ simply replace the text in both text pastes above.

If only there were a way of removing that /etc/hosts hack it would mean zero config from then on. If anyone has any ideas do let me know. The addition to the hosts file seems to need applying if you are working from the same box the Apache server resides on. If you arn’t and the box is a local dedicated server its not needed at all and domains can be added and removed as necessary.

One of the regrettably unavoidable aspects of the Unix shell like environments is the impedance between what a user says and what a user means. While this is present in all computing environments the sheer power of Unix based command lines make a potential mistake catastrophic.